Dear Friends ~ All around us seasonal changes are beginning to mark the passage of time and I wonder—have the efficiencies of technology and the urgencies of modern culture's pace changed our relationship with time itself? I recently participated in a workshop on nature drawing. With naught but a couple of charcoal pencils and a sketchbook, I sat down in the dewy morning grass to look at a mushroom. Twenty minutes passed as we encountered each other. The feathery white fringe encircling its narrow dome caught minuscule pearls of dew. Peering under its cap, I discovered a delicate collar necklace draped at an angle around the top of its pristine silk-smooth stalk. Without disturbing this elegantly turbaned upright specimen, I peered inside another fallen-over comrade to discover a whole ream of filmy, tissue-thin "pages" hidden within its cap. Only later did I begin to wonder if these caps were already fully formed to remain tall narrow parabolas or whether they were just waiting to open like a parasol being raised. Had I opted for the instant gratification of a photograph, the phone would hold an image but would I have spent time noticing how the gills inside morphed from charcoal grey to salmon to ecru? Would I have left any space for wondering how this moment fit into before and after? Or would this little wonder have flitted in and out of memory in a careless heartbeat?
As the threads of fabric are woven into a pattern, so the Self as the living garment of divinity is woven out of the many decisions and crises by which we are affected in the course of our lives. Whether or not they lead to a manifestation of the Self depends solely on our response. Many of us have observed that children, even small children, when faced with some difficulty, possess an attitude which many adults could only envy. That "something," the lack of which we experience as soullessness, is a "someone" who takes a position, who is accountable and who feels committed. Where this higher, responsible ego is lacking there can be no Self.